I THINK I might have covered all the factions there, but please forgive me and the generations of me’s that are to come (I might be exaggerating a bit here, but do let me dream heroic things) if you belong to a faction I have failed to identify in the war to declare certainty regarding our understanding of WHAT exactly makes us smart AND what smarts actually is (probably not using the word smarts like I just did).

Take that in, though, the myriad of theories that abound, and the myriad of far-reaching systems (enforced through a demonstrated commitment to apply potential lethal force to individuals who are acting outside of the system’s parameters and refuse to yield, for whatever reason, to civil offers to simply pay a fine or submit your person to lethal-force enforced containment) that have been designed and written up in committees, boards, or often with hands as few as one.

Today, for instance, agents alleging to have cracked the code for cultivating the best kind of intelligence for humanity have delivered to us Common Core. Now, I won’t go deeply into exactly WHAT Common Core is, and not just because I don’t have a profoundly deep understanding of Common Core.

Common Core, for me, regardless of what philosophical, scientific, sociological, psychological (or whatever else authoritative institutions have given legitimacy to this program), is simply a representative of a small group of individuals (300 or less, in this case, as near as I have been able to tell from the vast swathe of conspiracy theory and legit YouTube sleuthing videos out there) who are using the power of the promise of optimizing human intelligence to sway individuals with the power to call on lethal-force enforcement, be it directly or indirectly, to use that influence to carry forth their program.

In this case, Common Core is always offered as an option to local school districts (by the various states that have chosen to enact Common Core). The school districts that opt out of Common Core often risk (especially where school districts are more reliant on state funding) facing difficult budget decisions afterwards.

The money the school districts are seeking in most (but not all) cases is money that was taken out of the communities the district serves through state and federal taxation of local commerce interaction. It goes without saying that a school district that decides to go to a state capital to get its money back if the state cuts its funding is gonna have a bad time.

You’re gonna have a bad time.

As for the family that has limited to no resources to take their child out of a school that uses Common Core (assuming the parent is against the program), they have no choice but to send their child to school. If they don’t, eventually, a cop with a gun will show up to find out why their kid is not in school.

As for the people who do not support Common Core, but are still “asked” to support the school district through various taxes (with the Real Estate Tax being the ginormous of the ginormous when it comes to this “support”), if they politely say no, then a polite series of actions eventually ends (so long as you continue to politely say no) with lethal-force enforcement, moving the “ask” to a command.

Now, for this little rant here I don’t want to go down the ‘but muh gov’ and then ‘muh roads’ discource. I understand for many of you that you have various concepts that give place for state authority, concepts that, you would argue, mitigate what seems like a pretty brutal, authoritarian practice.

One such concept is the consent of the governed, the idea that so long as people continue to participate, so long as they have a democratic voice (for the republican and/or democratic governance folks out there), then some sacrifice of personal autonomy, personal sovereignty is warranted. I don’t want to lose you folks here, nor do I want to lose the other folks out there that have other concepts that give legitimacy to this type of authority.

My purpose here is to walk out, even if somewhat imprecisely, the full ramifications of non-compliance against these types of programs that allege to have cracked the useful intelligence development code, and then won favor with individuals who have the power to use lethal-force enforcement as a tool to ensure compliance with the program.

Intelligence. As I started out, the theories abound as to exactly WHAT Intelligence is and WHAT the best kind of intelligence is. There are even theories regarding what types of intelligence there are. For example, there are proponents of measuring and understanding what is being called “emotional intelligence.”

I won’t vouch for the concept one way or another at present, but it does serve as one example of the multitude of theories out there among arguably “credible” “scholars” (I’ll leave the audience to decide the nature of credible and scholar).

Yet with all this vast uncertainty, there still exists among us hubristic engineers and their fanboys and fangirls who INSIST they’ve cracked the code. They understand what intelligence is. They know EXACTLY the types of intelligence humanity should develop. They have a plan that will get the job done.

I would wager that, behind closed doors (and I have to be EXTREMELY Polyanish in describing this potentially secret exchange between ACTUAL human engineers) that certainty is hardly expressed.

I would wager that the human engineers understand probably far better than I even understand (which isn’t extremely difficult in that I am not a human engineer trying to develop the program to save humanity from itselt- TL:DR I’m not a prickelstein) exactly why they should feel so uncertain about what they’re doing.

But most of them (again, I’m REAAAAAAAALLLLY giving them the benefit of the doubt here) have probably developed some pretty sound intellectual arguments using references to studies and other human engineers (prickelsteins, if you’re being nasty, as I imagine saying to you in my best Janet Jackson impression) that might even convince me (until someone way smarter than me dissects the dog poo out of that gossamer-winged edifice) they might be right.

But how do you sell? Edward Bernays showed us how to sell. You sell by hitting those power points on the body, the emotional ones. Those are the shortcuts to the soul, the governors of the mind, those endorphin-punching power points, the emotional highs and lows of the human expression in various socio-cultural forms.

The short version of that is this- Make them hate, Make them Love, then sell them the plan, the goods, the service, the person, the war, etc., etc.. (there’s like a LOT of etc’s that should be added here).

Marketing requires lying, or at least extensive hyperbolizing, and believe you me, while you might know how, let’s just say, imprecise your grand certaintarian claims really are, your customers, on the main, don’t, at least not until they’ve tried what you’re selling.

In this case, you’re not selling something you taste and find out immediately….Dude, this sucks. This isn’t the YummyYummy you said it is. It takes like the liquid offal of the backside of a human, say, a rather, um, largish human, sitting in the hot sun, naked, on pleather sheets.

I had to go there folks, to emphasize the gut-wrenching point I am making.

You don’t get that immediate signal back that lets you know you just bought a crappy product. Nope. For this product, and similar ones to it (Google John Taylor Gatto and follow where that leads, hint, it leads to the Underground History of the American Public School System, the grandest of grandest Intelligence Development Programs), you don’t get to see the results, well, ever.

You get programs that can come into existence, fail to deliver on their promise, but because of the political and commercial power these programs grant to certain “vendors” and political advocates of the program, never mind the economic advantage to the schools that run these programs (with many notable exceptions in the form of the so-called unfunded mandates), these programs continue, with promises of reform, and scapegoats found to blame the previous failures on.

Sometimes, just for kicks, there are multiple scapegoat contenders offered up, all ones that conveniently advantage the various factions picking at the bones of failing program. PURELY from an entertainment and memes of production perspective (a phrase that will be dated by the year 2020 at the latest), when this happens, hilarity is sure to ensue.

Common Core may or may not survive, but, at the very least, in thousands of schools across America, the program is being run and the results will not be in for maybe another 10ish years, if they ever come in at all.

A treasure trove of resources, in terms of the humans on both sides of the desk, in terms of the resources needed to operate this program, is being invested in for a prolonged period of time, a program with another dubious claim to cracking the code of human intelligence.

It’s one of many being operated in various forms around the world today, by conservatives, liberals, commies, fascists, etc. It’s one of many that has come before and one of many that is likely to come in the future.

So long as vast swathes of humanity continue to be under the programs of human engineers that imagine they have cracked the human intelligence code, and are willing to use potentially lethal-force enforcement to execute their program, the full panoply of the human potential for ‘intelligence’ is being bottlenecked by these programs that confine people, again and again, to oversimplistic testing and evaluation which locks them in to intellectual conditioning that, rather than enabling the individual to reach the fullest potential of their own intellectual curiosity and capacity, they are confined to narrowly defined accepted modes of intellectual exercise (like being trained for over half a year to pass a certain state standards test that’s part of one of these programs).

Even if all of the intentions behind these programs was to enable people to follow paths of THEIR choosing, the bottle-necking of the diverse potential of human intellectual development will still occur.

But I give these programs incredibly unearned benefit of the doubt. Hardly ever, if ever, was a program developed by human engineers, one which was promoted and enforced by state lethal-force power, designed to treat the individual in the program as an end in and of themselves. Rather, humans in these systems are almost always (I’m willing to wager a small pension it’s really ALWAYS) means to a larger end, whether it is to produce good workers for a corpostate or good soldiers for a militant state, or even if it was to produce philosophers for an enlightened state.

The program does not serve the individual, it serves the organization(s), be they government orgs, ngos, or corporations. It is designed to produce humans useful to the client, not to produce usefulness for the human (by their somewhat subjective terms).

To unbound human potential, you must end the bottlenecks that are limiting that diverse expression of understanding humanity has yet to coming close to tapping into.

Wherever large-scale experiments (because that is all they are, at the end of the day) are conducted that attempt to control the development of individuals’ human intellects, there are sure to follow extreme specialists with little holistic understanding of the world around them, easily manipulated, useful experts that can meet the demands of the clients that ‘funded’ the programs created by the human engineers.

Hopefully, this gives you a little perspective on institutional-styled education systems in general.

Paul Gordon is the publisher and editor of iState.TV. He has published and edited newspapers, poetry magazines and online weekly magazines.
He is the director of Social Cognito, an SEO/Web Marketing Company. You can reach Paul at pg@istate.tv